Where Is The Nintendo Switch SD Card Slot?
Our Nintendo Switch has a SD card slot on the rear, on the bottom toward the left side. We use the SD card slot primarily to store games and transfer pictures. The 32 GB of built in memory of our Nintendo Switch fills up fast with downloadable games. The newer Switches come with 64 GB of built in storage.
Once the built in memory of your Switch fills up you have to start archiving games to add new ones. Instead of doing that every other day, we got a 64 GB SD card to put in the expanded memory slot.
It’s great for additional storage since we rarely have to archive any games. Archiving doesn’t lose any save game data. It just eliminates the game files from memory. You can always download a game again to play it later.
It’s just a pain to keep going back and forth archiving and downloading games after you run out of room. Getting a SD card to makes more room for games on your Switch.
Not only did it expand our storage space for games, we can easily transfer pictures and videos from our Switch to a PC.
How to Use SD Card with Your Switch
You need to shut down the Switch, not put it to sleep, before you put the SD card in. Once you put the SD card the Switch does the rest. It automatically uses the SD card once the internal memory is full.
You can manually move games, pictures, or videos in the settings, data management menu. We transferred all our pictures and videos to the SD card.
Our system memory is full from games so any pictures we take all wind up on the SD card anyway. Which works out well since we use the SD card to transfer all our pictures to a PC.
We shut down the Switch, pull out the SD card, then insert it into our card reader on our PC. Navigate to the Album\Pictures\ folder then copy the 2023 folder and paste it in our pictures folder on the PC.
Once the SD card is back in our Switch, we delete all the screen shots and videos from the settings menu.
SD Card Sizes and Types
While you can put a 2 TB SD card in I wouldn’t recommend it. In my experience a 64 GB SD card has been adequate.
We take a lot of pictures and have over 50 games. Our 64 GB SD card holds about 600 pictures and we transfer them about once a week. We could archive more games to make more room for pictures. But we found dealing with 3,000 pictures at once gets confusing.
We archive a game every couple of month or so depending on the size of the games we’re swapping. While I could see getting a 128 or 256 GB SD card in the future to completely eliminate archiving games. A 1 TB SD card seems excessive, let alone a 2 TB card.
As for the type, we use microSDXC UHS-I U1 100MB/s. It’s fast for transfers to a PC. Which is the only time I’ve ever noticed speed making a difference.
I’ve used slower SD cards in my Switch and can’t tell any difference when playing games. When transferring pictures a slower SD card adds 15 or 20 seconds to the transfer time.
The only bottleneck for speed I’ve noticed for the Switch is the internet connection. Downloading games over wireless seems slower than wired connections. Wireless definitely lags more than wired in my experience when playing any game online.
Summary
Once you find the SD card slot under the kick stand on the back of the Nintendo Switch, you can expand its capacity for games, pictures, and videos.
Where is the SD card on a Switch brought to you by David M.
I’m David M. I’ve been playing video games a long time, my pong game was fire. Now, my kids run circles around me but we always have a good time. We mostly play party and family games. Strategy and battle games are still among my favorites. I like writing about games almost as much as I do playing them. My favorite games are: Moving Out 2, Out of Space and Overcooked All You Can Eat.
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